A Year in Reading: Gina Frangello

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“There are two kinds of decay: mine and everyone else’s.” This line occurs near the end of Sarah Manguso’s deceptively slim tour de force on illness, mortality, and metaphor, The Two Kinds of Decay, and speaks to the book’s high wire acts of duality and the paradox between the primal narcissism of the individual body vs. the transcendent empathy that makes life more than a solitary hall of mirrors. Manguso — like many great thinkers before her — seems to ultimately bridge the gap between the two through the small-yet-almost-impossible act of learning to pay attention. Throughout The Two Kinds of Decay, we pay attention with her, to the almost unbearably physical descent that befell her in 1995, turning her from a typically self-absorbed Ivy League college student (preoccupied with sex and infiltrating the moneyed classes), to a frequent hospital patient suffering partial paralysis and undergoing treatments every few days to cleanse her own blood of the toxins in her plasma that were trying to poison and kill her. Manguso — also the author of The Guardians, a stunning, poetic memoir on a mentally ill friend’s suicide, is a singular writer, as distinctive and inimitable as Anne Carson, but more accessible, and her books, though unflinchingly unsentimental and devoid of any New Age mumbo jumbo, are tender, deeply spiritual beasts.

Recommended pairings: I read The Guardians some time ago, but devoured The Two Kinds of Decay — published in 2008 — immediately after Ed Hirsch’s most recent book, Gabriel, a profound meditation on grief and loss both individual and throughout (mainly artistic) history. Reading both Manguso’s books alongside Gabriel and Emily Rapp’sThe Still Point of the Turning World, one of the most powerful books of last year, would be strong medicine, but likely more emotionally and intellectually transformative than what most philosophy or theology courses could possibly offer.

Gina Frangello
is the author of three books of fiction: A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014), Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010), and My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus 2006). She is co-fiction editor for The Nervous Breakdown, is on faculty at UCR-Palm Desert's low residency MFA program in Creative Writing, and served for several years as the Sunday editor at The Rumpus. The longtime Executive Editor of Other Voices magazine and Other Voices Books, she now runs Other Voices Queretaro, an international writing program in the Central Highlands of Mexico. She can be found at www.ginafrangello.com.

John Wray is the author of the novels The Right Hand of Sleep and Canaan's Tongue. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and a Whiting Award in fiction, he was recently named one of Granta magazine's twenty best American novelists under thirty-five. His new novel, Lowboy, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this coming March.Most of the time, when a novel is forgotten, literary justice has been served: it's atrociously written, or its attitudes have aged badly, or it's simply a lesser imitation of a book that made the cut. Sometimes, though, a work of originality and genius slips inexplicably through the cracks, and it's in search of these lost treasures - 'black pearls', as my friend Bill, an antiquarian book dealer, calls them - that poor sods like me spend their days in second-hand bookshops, blowing dust off of sun-bleached spines and flipping doggedly through voided library paperbacks we've never even heard of. Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban, is a black pearl if there ever was one. Set in a post-apocalyptic England in which all but the most basic civilization has decayed, and written in a kind of radioactive pidgin that heightens both the absurdity and horror of the world it describes, the novel tells the story of the uneasy friendship between two adolescent boys - one a normal teenager, one a clairvoyant mutant - who happen, more or less by accident, on the secret of the atomic bomb. I won't say more than that, but trust me, it's a humdinger. In the words of Anthony Burgess, whose A Clockwork Orange is one of the only novels Riddley Walker owes a debt to: "This is what literature was meant to be - exploration without fear."More from A Year in Reading 2008

Any outrage Coetzee evokes with his various portrayals of the treatments of animals, of blacks, of women, is achieved without raising the decibel level of his voice above the mildly conversational. Therein lies much of his narrative power.